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Happy 2015!

Helena and I have just come back from the holidays with our family in Portugal and I would like to tell you how 2014 was a very good and special year in our lives. The big event that will make us never forget this past year was of course the birth of our daughter Olivia. Everyone who has kids will tell you how nice it is to have them and they’re right! All the tiresome, stress and lack of sleep is forgotten when we see her smile every morning.

Helena and I love to travel and have made at least a big trip every year for a few years. With the baby, those trips have to be shorter but since she was born we’ve been already to Portugal (twice), Spain (visiting our old colleagues in A Coruña) and the U.K. (more particularly London). That thing that people tell you about how having a child changes one’s perspective on many things is also very true for traveling. Olivia can be very easily awaken by noises so now we realize how noisy some cars and motorcycles are… London was awful in that regard. The underground was noisy as hell, including the very loud voice warnings. Also, as a big European capital, I was expecting its public sites to be accessible but even in the emblematic Victoria Station there was no elevator to access the underground. The sad thing is that while the stroller is a temporary annoyance for us, people in wheelchairs have to cope with that permanently.
We’re very curious about visiting Berlin with the baby to check those annoyances in there (because I seem to remember the underground being more silent and accessible) so that’s a trip we might do this year.

The book count kept low this year: I read 3 books and started another one which I haven’t finished yet (REAMDE by Neal Stephenson).

Even with the lack of time due to the baby, thanks to my wonderful wife I still keep playing squash and attending the CERN Micro Club once a week. Despite the awkward name, this is one of CERN’s many clubs and is concerned with technology, having several sections. I am part of the Robotics section in the club where we’ve been building a 3D printer.
This means less time for my side projects so this year, unfortunately there was only a couple of versions of OCRFeeder and no new version of Skeltrack.
I think that the only solution for OCRFeeder is to eventually have new contributors if there is an interest in keeping the project alive.

About Skeltrack, although its development was stalled during most of 2014, my friend Iago keeps improving it for his Master’s Thesis, and I had a lot of emails from people who are using it. I even visited one of them at EPFL who is using the project with his own 3D cameras which means that having a device-agnostic library was a good decision.

As for my job at CERN, I am finishing what I have been working on so I hope to talk about it in more detail soon.

This year’s donations went to the following places mainly (apart from the EFF, to whom donate every time I buy a Humble Bundle):
– Wikipedia: don’t think I need to explain its relevance;
– GNOME Builder: because this great guy was bold enough to quit his job in order to make an awesome and long needed IDE for GNOME (maybe you can still donate!);
– Chão dos Meninos: an association from my hometown who helps children in risk — I always used to donate to big international projects such as Wikipedia and EFF but last year I realized that, since I don’t pay taxes in my country (because I live abroad), one way of contributing a small bit is to donate to an association such as this one.

I still do not know what 2015 will bring but I do hope that the tendency continues and it turns out to be a great year again!